Tavi Gevinson Rookie Online Magazine Launch Details

Tavi Gevinson's New Web Magazine, Rookie, Launching Monday

>> After announcing last month that she had parted ways with Jane Pratt and Say Media — the backers of Pratt's website, xojane.com — Tavi Gevinson is readying the launch of her own Web magazine, Rookie, on Monday.

The site's editorial content will have monthly themes, with the first focused around beginnings — “[It's] fairly wide-ranging, but definitely focused on ‘back-to-school’ and other ‘firsts,’” said Emily Condon, Rookie's managing editor, who was a former staffer for This American Life.

“Our content respects a kind of intelligence in the readers that right now a lot of writing about teenage girls doesn’t,” Gevinson told New York Times Magazine. “People think it’s just going to be another site or magazine that talks about how great celebrities are or how awful celebrities are or dieting . . .” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Just you wait and see.’”

Gevinson expects to do around three posts a day, with the first appearing after school, the second at dinnertime and the third “when you do your last Facebook check around bed or whatever,” Gevinson said. “I’m in school, and I can’t be at my computer all day.”

She's assembled a staff that includes Condon; New York Times blog specialist Jeremy Zilar acting as Rookie's project manager; Anaheed Alani (wife to This American Life's Ira Glass, who advised Gevinson in negotiations with Say Media, and a former freelance fact-checker for The New York Times Magazine) as story editor; regular writers like Lesley Arfin and Sady Doyle; and guest contributors including Zooey Deschanel, Miranda July, Winnie Holzman, Joss Whedon, Jack Black, Dan Savage, Patton Oswalt, Shannon Woodward, Anna Faris, Kid Sister, Supercute!, Paul Feig, JD Samson, Alia Shawkat, and Fred Armisen.

New York magazine's parent company, New York Media, is handling advertising for the site, and Gevinson's father, who now acts as her manager, says they're currently in talks with potential investors and sponsors.